


The Seamstress

by Black_Knight



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-03
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2017-12-27 00:50:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/972366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Knight/pseuds/Black_Knight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry is running towards his mother when it happens.</p><p>(Diverges from canon near the end of the S2 finale "And Straight On Till Morning")</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Henry is running towards his mother when it happens.

She puts up her gloved hand, and he jerks to a halt, confused. There’s a _crack_ behind him, and her hand snaps back and hits her shoulder. She immediately starts to raise her other hand, but there’s another _crack_ and her upper body shudders. She fights to stay standing, keeps waving her hands, even after the third _crack_ causes her whole body to jerk and her eyes to flash with great pain. But the determination remains until she sees something behind him, and her face relaxes. There’s a final _crack_ , and she simply drops like a stone. Henry finally finds his voice, because he’s never in his life seen her just _let go_ , and he screams. And screams.

Henry’s eyes open, and he gasps a little for breath. It’s very dark in his mother’s elegant bedroom, but he can feel her hand rubbing his back.

“It was just a nightmare, right?”

The hand slows to a stop. “Kid, I’m sorry.”

“Right.” Henry is fully awake now and he remembers everything. It isn’t just a nightmare, and it’s Emma, not Regina, next to him now. Even though it’s Regina’s bedroom.

“I’m taking you to Archie tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’ve woken up like this every night. You need to talk to someone.”

“I don’t want to! And you shouldn’t be in here.” During the day, Henry knows why everything has to be the way it is, and could generally keep a handle on his frustration, but at night, he can’t help but lash out at Emma.

“Look, it’s weird for me too. But you get these nightmares, and I don’t want to not be here.”

“But I don’t want you here. You don’t make anything better.” He shakes Emma’s hand off his back and sits up.

Regina - his _mom_ \- always knew how to touch him after a nightmare, how to soothe him. During the day, Emma is his mom too, and he really loves her, but when the night terrors come and reduce him to someone even smaller and younger than he is, his primal instinct is for Regina. Just like in the mines that day. 

“All right, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stay in the guest room from now on, and let you sleep in your mom’s bed alone, if you talk to Archie.”

“Whatever.” Henry gets up and grabs the phone off the dresser, and leaves the bedroom.

Emma turns onto her back and sighs, hating herself for feeling relieved that Henry has gone off to his own bedroom. During the day, Henry is manageable, but at night, she has no idea what to do. And she has her own painful memories to deal with. She lies awake, eyes open and staring at the ceiling, and feels herself irresistibly pulled back to the previous week once more.

 

**One week ago**

“Why are we doing this, again?” David asks Emma and Mary Margaret as they watch people settle into chairs in front of the Mills family vault. There are more people than there are chairs, which would be a positive sign for most funerals, but not this one.

“It’s important for closure,” Archie answers, even though David hadn’t directed the question his way, and Emma rolls her eyes. She knows this funeral needs to happen, but it’s annoying how the bug not only insisted on it but has basically taken control, down to choosing the start time and setting up the chairs. (The bug? When did she start sounding like Regina? Then again, maybe Regina had been more justified in her perpetual irritation at everything and everyone - except her precious son - than Emma had previously thought.)

Emma jolts out of her reverie when Archie addresses her. “Where is Henry?”

“Come on. I know you weren’t there on the docks yesterday, but you don’t seriously think it’s a good idea that he be here for this.”

“He needs closure more than anyone-”

“Tell me again what to do with my son, and I’ll figure out how to turn you back into a cricket and then rip your wings off.” (Great. A typical Regina threat. Apparently Regina’s at her own funeral in spirit, embodied by Emma.)

Archie cringes a bit, but then gathers his courage and opens his mouth, and Emma just knows he’s about to dump a load of psychobabble on her head about shock and anger and grief. She cuts him off with, “It’s one o’clock, you better start. Regina never tolerated lateness.”

Even though she was brusque, Archie just smiles ruefully. “That’s true. Every session, she always knocked on my door exactly on time. I could set my watch by her.”

She and her parents sit in the three chairs at the very front while Archie moves into place to address the crowd. Mary Margaret leans over to Emma and whispers, “Of course Henry shouldn’t be here, but are you _sure_ about leaving him at Regina’s house?”

“It’s what he wanted. He feels closer to his mother there.” No lie.

“I can understand that, but should he really be alone?”

“He’ll be fine. This isn’t going to take that long - it’s just Archie.”

With that, they turn their attention to Archie, who has finished his opening greeting and is now starting on his eulogy. Emma stares at the urn that’s sitting on the steps of the Mills vault behind him. It’s hard to believe that an entire body can be reduced to such a small amount of ashes. At least she’d put her foot down where his idea of having a picture of Regina next to the urn was concerned. At best, it would’ve ended up with magic marker all over it. At best. At worst...well, the worst had already happened.

 

**Eight days ago**

The four of them see Tamara and Greg open the portal. Emma screams and runs even faster, but then Tamara, Greg and Henry simply freeze, and Emma, David and Mary Margaret nearly crash into them. Confused, they check behind them and see Regina standing a good distance away, hand up, and realize she’d stopped running and worked her magic instead.

Emma glances down at the open portal on the water, feeling equal parts horror and relief, before turning to her son. She sees he’s still frozen, and she’s still so unnerved by the events of the last couple of hours that she just screams at Regina, “Unfreeze him, dammit!”

(Later she’ll wonder if it would have made any difference if she hadn’t insisted on releasing Henry - it’s not like he was hurt, Regina would never hurt him, she’d _saved_ him - but right now, she just really needs to hold her son after everything that’s happened and hugging a statue doesn’t exactly fit the bill.)

Regina doesn’t say anything, just rolls her eyes and waves her hand, and Henry comes to life. He pulls himself away from the still-frozen Greg and Tamara and throws himself into Emma’s body. She holds onto him with everything she has while David kneels down and works the ties off Henry’s wrists. He looks up at her. “How-”

“Regina froze you all.”

Henry turns around and sees Greg and Tamara still immobilized, and grins. “Cool.” He looks beyond them and finds Regina in the distance, and she smiles at him. He takes off in her direction, and Emma lets him go, sure Regina wants to hug their son too.

(And really, that should have been her big clue right there, Regina just staying where she is, but she looks so regal as she watches her son run to her that Emma forgets that the woman never not looked like she wasn’t in the middle of a fucking photo shoot.) So Emma just regards the scene for a second before she turns back to her parents, who are looking down at the open portal and worrying about closing it before it can suck in anyone.

“Maybe if we throw something in?”

“Regina can probably close it.”

“How about we throw Greg in?” Emma snarks.

Then the first _crack_ sounds behind her, and Emma whirls. Greg’s not frozen anymore. And almost at the same instant, Tamara comes flying by her, but Emma doesn’t even try to grab her because Greg is already firing a second time at Regina. She lunges forward at Greg, her vision narrowing down to the gun in his hand, and there’s both a splash and a third gunshot.

Then Emma’s on Greg and they’re struggling over his gun. David calmly steps up and shoots Greg in the head, and he’s dead before he hits the ground at Emma’s feet. She barely has time to process that before Henry’s scream cuts through the air. She turns and sees Regina crumpled on her side on the ground and Henry going to her, and then they all start running.

David is faster than either woman and reaches Regina and Henry first. He takes one look at Regina and picks up Henry bodily and carries him a few feet away. Henry struggles against David’s chest, but he keeps a firm grip on his grandson. As Emma runs by them, she hears David say to him, “Don’t watch. Don’t watch.”

Emma and Mary Margaret’s knees hit the ground on either side of Regina. Emma turns Regina onto her back and tries to assess the damage. Blood coming from one of Regina’s hands, something she wouldn’t even have noticed if Regina’s ruined hand hadn’t fallen on her leg. Blood under Regina, so at least one exit wound. Regina’s black coat obscures the various entry wounds, but when Emma pulls open the coat, she sees a hole in Regina’s red jacket and _two_ wounds where her low-cut black shirt has left her chest exposed. Emma tries to staunch the bleeding with Regina’s own scarf, but there’s just so much blood and too many wounds - she can’t apply pressure to all of them at once. The blood keeps coming, soaking Regina’s front and staining Emma’s hands. 

On Regina’s other side, Mary Margaret is yelling into her cell for the Blue Fairy to pick up her call, and Emma looks up at her. “She didn’t even heal Regina right the first time!” All that torture by Greg...she’s sure if Regina had been fully healed, her freeze spell wouldn’t have failed.

“Who else can I call? Gold?! Whale? We need magic!”

“ _I_ have magic,” Emma says, and she desperately tries to force it out of her hands. But nothing happens. Either she’s out of magic too, or she just doesn’t have the knowledge and ability. The latter’s more likely, since she hasn’t done nearly as much magic as Regina in the last few hours. 

“Regina, please, I need your help!” Regina had shaped Emma’s magic down in the mine, directed it to do what they needed, and she knew Regina could do the same now. Except Regina’s not conscious, hasn’t been conscious this whole time, even though her eyes are open. Emma had been so busy with the gunshot wounds that she’d barely spared a glance at Regina’s face - just enough to ascertain no head wound - but she really looks now. And she realizes why David carried Henry away, because watching the life drain out of those eyes that had always been so remarkably expressive is just about the worst.

After a few seconds, everything goes still under her hands, and Emma knows with a dull certainty that Regina is dead. The phone drops from Mary Margaret’s hand. Numbly, Emma goes to close Regina’s eyes, but then she realizes that she’s going to end up smearing blood all over Regina’s face, and she can’t bear that.

It’s Snow who, after quietly regarding Regina’s face with an incredibly complex expression, closes her eyes with the gentlest gesture Emma could have imagined. Then she gets up and almost staggers over to her husband and grandson.

At her nod, David puts Henry down and Henry, in his haste to run, immediately slips and falls onto his hands and knees. He half-slides, half-scrambles to Mary Margaret’s vacated spot by his mother’s side and puts a hand on her arm. He pushes once, twice, but Regina doesn’t move or open her eyes. Henry shakes her shoulder, and then says in the smallest voice Emma’s ever heard, “Mommy?”

Emma breaks then, tears falling down her face. Henry starts crying too, and Emma just doesn’t know how she’s going to be able to help her son through this. She’d saved Regina from a lynch mob, a wraith, and martyrdom, all so Henry wouldn’t have to live without the woman who’d raised him and loved him for ten years. This is a sick, twisted version of third-time’s-the-charm, because for Regina to nearly die twice in less than 24 hours and then die right when everything was okay again...“ _Damn_ it, Regina!”

She gets up after a moment and goes to her parents for comfort. Henry looks up at them after a while and says softly, “Why didn’t she duck? She just _stood_ there...”

Emma, David and Mary Margaret look at each other. From where they’d been standing, it was clear to them. Henry had been between Regina and Greg. Regina hadn’t tried to duck because she had been afraid that Greg would shoot Henry if she did. So she had stayed on her feet, taking the shots and desperately trying to call up her magic, until she saw that her son was safe.

 

**One week ago**

Emma focuses again on her immediate surroundings. Archie is still going on, and she’s dimly heard enough to know that he is giving Regina a kinder eulogy than she probably deserves. But if there was anyone in Storybrooke who had been inclined to assume the best of Regina, it was Archie, she knew that. It was why she had let him take the reins in organizing the funeral today, as irritating as he’d been at times.

However, the rest of the crowd is decidedly unhappy. What began as muttering in the back where the overflow is standing steadily gets louder as it moves through the rows of chairs. Finally it is Leroy who jumps to his feet and yells, “Enough!”

Whale shoves forward then. “You’ve talked enough, Archie. It’s time for the rest of us to speak about what the Evil Queen meant to us.”

“Here we go,” Emma sighs as attendees begin stepping up to list Regina’s crimes against them. Archie is pushed off to one side, where he stands a little confused and a lot sad.

After a minute, Emma stands up and says to her parents, “I’ve heard enough. Let’s just finish this so I can get back to Henry.”

Her parents nod, and they easily slip around the rather large group that is too busy yelling over each other to really notice anything else. Emma picks up the urn of ashes and takes it inside the vault, and David shuts the door behind the three of them so they won’t be disturbed.

“I hope Archie’s satisfied,” Emma says wearily as she places the urn on top of Regina’s father’s tomb, figuring that would probably have been Regina’s choice. “The town is definitely getting _closure_ now.”

“He’s not wrong,” Mary Margaret says. “Regina killed so many people, and hurt even more, but she never really faced justice. She wasn’t imprisoned or executed or even tried for her crimes, not in this land. You can’t begrudge her victims for taking this opportunity to work through their anger, even if it’s not exactly-”

“Classy?” Emma supplies. “I’m not classy, and even I know what’s going on out there now, and what happened yesterday, is really ugly. Whatever Regina did. Henry doesn’t deserve this.”

“Yes, it’s a good thing he's not here,” David says.

“Henry couldn’t go to his own mother’s funeral, and he can’t even come here _ever_. Nobody dared touch this vault while Regina was alive, but now that she’s gone, you know they’ll vandalize it with graffiti and baseball bats and I don’t know what else.”

“We’ll get the fairies to secure the door with magic, at least,” David promises. “Nobody will get in.”

“What about you, Mom? You were Regina’s victim too. I don’t see you out there talking.”

Snow’s face is inscrutable. “My feelings about Regina are my own, and very complicated.” She heads towards the door. “I don’t care to share them with anyone.”

Emma looks at David, and he shrugs. “It’s nothing new. She’s never really talked to me about Regina.”

“Huh.” Emma is kind of surprised at that; she’d figured that surely a couple who had a fairytale True Love shared everything.

After they leave the vault, David quietly pulls aside the Blue Fairy and has her secure the door magically. Emma and her parents head off in opposite directions, they for their home and Emma for Regina’s. David and Mary Margaret had wanted to come with her and see Henry, but Emma’d vetoed it. For now, Henry needs privacy.

When Emma reaches Regina’s house, she lets herself in with the key Henry had given her. She stands in the foyer and calls, “Kid?”

“In here,” comes his reply from deeper within the house.

Emma walks into the living room and Regina looks up from her spot beside Henry on the couch. “So, how was my funeral?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I know the title is odd, but it will be explained eventually - along with everything else. LOL


	2. Chapter 2

**(Still) One week ago**

Emma sinks into a chair opposite Regina and Henry.

“Archie’s eulogy was really nice. He focused on the positives. And there were actually a lot of positives. Your love for your son, your intelligence, your strength, determination-”

Regina and Henry are wearing identical shut-up-and-get-to-the-point expressions, and Emma’s struck by how much he looks like his adoptive mother sometimes.

“-uh, yeah. Other people decided they wanted to speak too, and things went sort of downhill from there.”

“Of course,” Regina says. “Is anything left of my vault?”

“We had to have the door sealed off with magic,” Emma admits.

“See! I was right!” Henry looks at Emma, and then back at Regina. “I’m always right.”

Regina smiles and strokes her son’s hair fondly. “I wouldn’t go that far. But in this instance, yes.”

 

**Eight days ago**

They’re all still in the same place - Henry kneeling by Regina’s lifeless body, Emma standing with her parents - when men begin to emerge from the surrounding buildings.

“We’re not dead,” one says in disbelief.

Another catches sight of Regina. “But _she_ is.”

A third laughs. “Ding-dong, the witch is dead!”

Some pick up the chant, while others give a general cheer. In short order, a crowd coalesces around Emma and her family. It’s uncomfortable, and Emma and her parents start subtly maneuvering people backwards, creating a wider, looser circle.

The one who started the chant is the loudest of the bunch, and Emma can’t keep herself from confronting him.

“Can you cut that out? My son is right behind me.”

He laughs unpleasantly. “So?”

“So that’s his other mother, and he doesn’t need to hear this shit. Just stop it.”

He ignores her and turns the volume up. “DING-DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD!”

“Hey, asshole, she saved you. All of you.”

Most of the crowd doesn’t even pay the slightest attention, but a few do look at her.

“She was down in the mines slowing the device so everyone else could get away. She was willing to die doing that. And then the two of us put our magic together and shut off the device completely.”

One of the few women present says, “How do you know it wasn’t your magic? You said she could only slow the device.”

“I wasn’t strong enough on my own. I could feel that, okay? It needed both of our magic.”

One of the other men shrugs. “Even if you’re right, she created the damn thing. All she did was fix her own mess. She doesn’t get points for that.”

“Come on, none at all?” _Let me die as Regina_ , she’d said.

Another man steps up. “You guys were just letting her run around Storybrooke because you were too chickenshit to do anything. ‘She’s trying to be better’ or whatever. Fuck that. The Evil Queen was just too powerful for you to take on.”

“We never knew when she was going to go off again. And now she’s dead, so we don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“That bitch getting herself killed is the best thing to happen today.”

The resulting round of cheers drowns out Emma’s attempted retort (“Really? Better than your lives being saved?”), and she gives up. So much for Regina’s final wish. The air is thick with the vitriol and hate. Behind her on the other side, David and Mary Margaret are pleading with the people nearest them, “He can _hear_ you,” without much effect.

She feels a tug on her jacket, and she looks behind her to see Henry. He’s standing now, and he beckons her closer, away from the men. He looks very pale, but determined. “We have to move my mom’s body.”

“Well, yeah, Henry, we will. Of course.”

“No, I mean _right now_. Who knows what they’re going to do to her? They might cut off her head and nail a - I don’t know, an _apple_ in its place!”

Emma stares at him. Regina is going to kill her for letting the kid watch _Game of Thrones_. Then she realizes Regina is never going to make a comment about Emma’s incompetent parenting ever again. Instead of being a silver lining, she just finds that thought utterly depressing.

It’s just her now, so she has to do better. She tries, “Kid, that was a TV show.”

“True, but television hasn’t fully depicted the horrors of reality.” Emma grits her teeth at the familiar voice. Fucking Gold. Way too late.

She turns to him and says quietly, “You’re not helping.”

“And you’re naive. Or you simply never paid attention in history class or to the news.”

Emma thinks about that, and she remembers some of the stuff she’s read. Dead soldiers’ bodies paraded through the streets, crowds tearing apart people even while alive. Lots of staked heads throughout history. It’s hard to believe that that can happen here...but then she takes another look around her at the crowd.

Mostly single men without families, who had clearly chosen to face the end by getting drunk. They’re happy to be alive, but there’s a real edge to their celebration. It isn’t a good crowd. She doesn’t know any of these guys, apart from throwing them into the drunk tank on occasion because of the barfights they’ve gotten into.

She turns away from Gold - right or not, he’d been useless during this entire crisis - and tells Henry, “Okay.”

She motions her parents over and lets them know that she’s going to carry Regina’s body to her car. David offers to do it, but Emma tells him to act as the lookout instead.

“What about Greg’s body?” Mary Margaret asks.   Emma bites back her first reply, which is “Fuck him,” and tells Mary Margaret to call the coroner and have his body put in the morgue whenever. This crowd isn’t interested in Greg’s body.

She takes off her long black coat and lays it over Regina, covering her face and upper body. (Shit, she’d neglected to close up Regina’s coat before Henry was allowed to go to her side. Yeah, let the kid look at his other mother absolutely drenched in blood, gaping gunshot wounds on full display. She has got to start learning, and fast.) Then she lifts Regina’s body up in her arms and begins to move. Her parents unobtrusively clear a path through the least dense part of the crowd encircling them, and luckily they’re mostly too drunk or too busy reveling, not quite ready for violence yet, though David has to stare a couple of them down.

Then they’re through the crowd, and Emma walks as quickly as she can the few blocks. Some other people see her, but with the coat over Regina, they don’t realize who she has in her arms. She places Regina in the back seat of the yellow VW bug - how she would have _hated_ that - and Henry gets into the front with her.

Emma drives directly to the funeral home. It’s not like an autopsy is needed, and she realizes now that what she needs to do is have Regina’s body cremated quickly, before all of Storybrooke finds out the Evil Queen is dead and more drunken mobs form. She runs into trouble with the funeral home owner, however, who is happy to have her business until he learns the identity of the deceased.

“What do you mean, no? My money’s good. And this is the one place in town.”

“If anyone found out my crematorium was used for the Evil Queen...people are very superstitious when it comes to their beloved dead. I’d have to replace the machine, and I just can’t afford that.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? I _have_ to get her body taken care of.” Emma’s relieved that Henry is still in the car, out of earshot, but she knows he can probably guess what’s going on.

“Do it the old-fashioned way. Get some kerosene and some wood, build a pyre and light her up.”

Emma snaps, and she grabs his shirt lapels. “No, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to close down for the day and leave, and I will handle the cremation. Privately.”

He doesn’t like that much, but he acquiesces in the face of her extreme pissed-offness. Emma carries Regina’s body in and lays her on an open table near the crematorium. After a quick lesson in how to operate the machine, he locks up and leaves Emma and Henry alone with Regina. Before Emma lets Henry into the cremation room, she removes her coat from Regina’s body, but closes up Regina’s own coat to ensure that none of the blood or wounds are visible.

Emma keeps an ear out for trouble, but she figures the funeral home being closed will make people think that nobody’s inside, and she can’t bear to rush Henry. Henry’s taken the glove off the hand of Regina’s that hadn’t been shot, and holds it. And so they sit with Regina’s body, Henry gazing at her face and Emma gazing anywhere else, and time seems to fade. 

Eventually Emma asks Henry if he would like to be alone, to say whatever he wants to say in private, and he nods. So Emma goes out front and waits. The sound of a car backfiring outside makes her jump, and she sees it’s getting dark. A prime time for trouble, if any trouble is going to start. So she goes back into the cremation room and gently tells Henry that it’s time.

She moves Regina’s body from the table onto the slab that slides into the crematorium. Henry takes Regina’s left hand one last time, and Emma stands behind him and really looks at Regina for the first time in hours. She’s still so beautiful even now.

Suddenly she feels an explosion of warmth in her heart that makes her gasp. Without really realizing what she’s doing, she leans forward and presses her lips to Regina’s for a second. Just a second before she pulls away again, shocked at herself, but something’s _happening_. There’s a white glow inside Regina’s coat, brightest at the spots where she was shot, and she can see the same thing with Regina’s gloved right hand. She opens the coat and sees underneath the dried blood that the wounds have actually knitted themselves closed, and immediately she looks at Regina’s face. But her eyes remain shut, her body perfectly still, and when Emma puts one hand on Regina’s chest, there’s no heartbeat or the rise and fall that comes with breathing.

Henry lunges forward, and Emma matches his desperate motion. This time her lips land on Regina’s forehead, and an instant later, Henry’s lips touch her cheek. Emma’s expecting a shockwave or maybe another white glow, but nothing of the sort happens. They pull back and look at each other in confusion.

And then Regina’s eyes open.


	3. Chapter 3

**(Still) Eight days ago**

Regina takes a breath - a breath! - and pushes herself up to a sitting position. Emma and Henry watch with wide eyes as Regina swivels her body around so that her legs come off the slab, and then she hops lightly down to the floor. And then Henry swarms her, hugging her fiercely. Regina hugs him back just as hard, and Emma grins. This whole long, awful, terrible day is finally ending.

“Regina, it’s-” Emma breaks off, at a loss for words.

Regina looks up at her. “It’s good to be alive.” She kisses her son on the head.

Henry finally pulls away, and in looking down at him, Regina notices how her entire front is caked in dried blood. She grimaces and pulls her coat closed. “You couldn’t have cleaned me up a little?”

“Well, we were going to cremate you anyway.”

“I noticed,” Regina said drily. “Still.”

“Just be happy you’re alive. You were like thirty seconds away from being incinerated.”

Henry winces at that and hugs Regina again, and Emma reminds herself to watch her words a little. “What happened here, anyway?”

Regina looks up. “I’m...not exactly sure. If I can just have a moment?”

“Sure, of course.” It’s understandable enough to Emma that Regina must be feeling overwhelmed after dying and then being resurrected. So she waits patiently while Regina and Henry spend a little more time hugging.

Finally Regina straightens up. “As cheery as this cremation room is, I’m ready to go home and take a shower. A long shower. Shall we go disappoint the town with the news of my life?”

Emma begins to return Regina’s sarcastic smirk, feeling better than she has all day, but then Henry shouts, “No!”

Regina, startled, bends down to him. “Henry, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have sounded so flippant.”

Henry is not calmed. “It’s not safe! You’re not safe!”

“Kid-”

“Henry-”

Henry’s face is getting red. “This just keeps happening! There was a lynch mob at our house! Mr. Gold sent a wraith after you! Greg shot you dead!”

“They had their reasons, Henry,” Regina says quietly.

“So? You had your reasons. That doesn’t make what you did right!”

“No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.”

“I just want this to stop. But it’s not going to. They’re going to keep trying to hurt you.”

“That lynch mob happened the day the curse broke,” Regina pointed out. “The passing of time-”

“How long did _you_ keep going after Snow White?”

Emma jumps in then. “Kid, your mother is the world champion grudge holder.” Regina flashes her a look she can’t quite read.

Henry folds his arms stubbornly. “Oh yeah? What about Greg? He said you knew him when he was a kid, Mom.”

“Yes,” Regina admits.

“Okay, so Greg is the silver medalist,” Emma says. “But nobody else is going to stay mad that long.”

“They don’t have to. They’ll kill her long before then.”

“Henry-”

“It’s only been a few months since the curse broke, and you’ve already died once. We had to move your body. So that nobody would cut off your head and nail an apple in its place!”

Regina stares at him, and turns slowly to Emma. “You allowed my ten-year-old son to watch a television program rated MA for graphic violence and sex?”

“Now? Really?” Emma complains, but a part of her is weirdly, overwhelmingly happy at Regina being Regina.

“Hey!” Henry yells, and Regina turns back to him. He has tears in his eyes. “You didn’t see them today! They were _awful_. They don’t care that you saved them. They’re going to want you executed.”

“Well, I’m not going to go along with that, and neither are your grandparents,” Emma reassures him.

But Regina just looks at Henry, and something passes between them. “You’re right. I have to stay dead.”

Henry nods, but Emma can’t believe it. “Wait, what? Are you pulling a Xena? Because first, we already brought you back, and second, that was some bullshit.”

Regina rolls her eyes. “Language, Ms. Swan. And you really need to stop watching so much television.”

“Oh yeah? I notice you seem to get all the references.”

“I spent the last 28 years in a town where very little changed besides what was on television. What’s your excuse?”

“Shouldn’t you be arguing less now that you know you’re True Loves?” Henry interrupts.

Emma drops heavily into a chair. “Oh my God.”

Henry turns to Regina. “And ‘Ms. Swan’? Really?”

Emma, still thunderstruck, mutters, “Fuck.”

“Language, dear,” Regina responds blandly. 

“Ugh!” 

Henry sighs. Regina gets back to the original thread. “What Henry and I mean is, the town thinks I’m dead. So we simply allow that misconception to continue.”

“Oh. Okay. That makes sense.” Emma catches Henry rolling his eyes at her slowness. That’s embarrassing, and she resolves to prove she’s smarter than a fifth grader. “Okay, people saw your body, so that’s one item accomplished. And some already know that you were going to be cremated, so that takes care of why nobody will have seen your body again after we moved you. But we still need to run the crematorium, and we need a body to make the cremation look real. I’m pretty sure the funeral home guy can tell if there wasn’t actually anything in the machine. Luckily, we have a body.”

Henry looks up. “Greg’s?”

“Yeah. Let me just call my mother and find out where it is now.”

Emma dials, and Mary Margaret picks up on the first ring. “Emma, are you all right? How’s Henry?”

“We’re dealing,” Emma says truthfully.

“Where are you?”

“We’re at the funeral home, just getting ready to do the cremation.”

“Oh. Mr. Glenn passed through a little while ago, and said you were going to do that out in the woods.”

Emma snorts. “He thinks he’ll have to replace the machine if anybody knows it was used for the Evil Queen. But that’s fine - it’ll keep people from coming here.”

“That’s a good thing. The scene on the docks really didn’t get better after you left.”

Emma seizes the opening. “Speaking of, did you get Greg’s body taken care of?”

“I called the coroner, like you said, but-”

“But?” Emma sees Regina and Henry look at her.

“Before she got there, Gold told the crowd that it was Greg and Tamara who activated the trigger.”

“What happened?” Emma asks, a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“It could have been worse...um, a couple of the men threw Greg’s body into the water.”

Probably had kicked it around some first, Emma supposes, but she doesn’t really want to know more. She ends the call pretty quickly after that.

Regina flinches slightly when she hears the news, but says evenly enough, “Well, that will allow me to teleport his body here without anyone noticing.”

Emma remembers belatedly, “What about a next of kin?”

“He didn’t have anyone other than Tamara,” Regina says quietly. “He told me that while-” she glances at Henry, and changes her wording, “-he had me.”

“She couldn’t ditch him fast enough to go jump into the portal. So much for her.”

Regina nods. Emma tells Henry, “Go wait in the other room.” She’s quite proud of herself for realizing the kid shouldn’t see Greg’s probably bloated and fish-nibbled body (hopefully just nibbled) and for beating Regina to the punch in telling him to leave.

Henry leaves, and Regina looks at Emma. “You too.”

“Me?”

“I want to be alone.”

Emma looks narrowly at her. “Are you all right? Do you have enough magic to do this?”

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

“Oh yeah? Because I remember you pretended to be fine earlier.” She takes a step closer to Regina. “ _Did_ the Blue Fairy heal you?”

“She pulled me back from the brink of death.” Emma shoots her a piercing look, and Regina adds wearily, “I suppose she believed I deserved to keep the splitting headache and aching body.”

“I knew it. I knew it wasn’t just what happened in the mines.”

“Regardless, I’m at full strength now.” 

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. My resurrection was quite...thorough.”

“So why don’t you want me here?”

“I simply wish to be alone with Owen’s body.”

“Owen? You mean Greg?”

“Owen is his name,” Regina says evenly. Emma begins to whatever that, but Regina cuts her off. “Names have power, Ms. Swan.”

Emma can’t understand Regina at all. Her affect is really odd, like she’s almost sad over the guy who’d tortured her and killed her. But Emma grudgingly goes and waits with Henry in the other room. After a few minutes, they hear the crematorium start up.

When Regina lets them back in, everything is cleaned up and Greg’s - Owen’s - ashes are in an urn. After assuring Emma that she still has plenty of magic left, Regina teleports to her house. Emma and Henry make a big show of leaving the funeral home with the urn, in case anyone’s watching. Then they drive to Regina’s.

It takes Regina a while to scrub all the blood off herself in the shower, so Emma calls her mother again and lets her know that the cremation is done. It turns out that Archie is with her parents, having called on them in hopes of talking to Henry about his mother’s death. Archie insists on speaking to Emma, and that’s when she finds out that he wants an actual service of some sort for Regina. It’s a terrible idea...but also a pretty useful one, Emma recognizes. It’ll cement in the townspeople’s minds that Regina is dead. So she agrees to let Archie pull something together for the next day - earlier is better, so that people can see the urn, she figures.

 

**One week ago**

“We need to talk about what to do next,” Regina says.

“Way ahead of you. That funeral was useful for another reason - I started dropping hints with my parents about how hard it’s going to be for Henry living in this town.”

Henry looks up. “We have to leave, right?”

“Yeah, your mom can’t skulk around this house forever.”

“I do not skulk. I simply stay away from the windows.”

“Whatever, Your Majesty. Point is, it won’t come as a surprise when I decide that it’ll be best if we leave so that Henry can start over somewhere else. Henry, are you okay with that?”

“Yeah. I mean, I’ll miss some people...but it’ll be exciting too. I had fun in New York.”

“What about you?” Regina asks.

Emma shrugs uncomfortably. “There’s not really anything else we can do. And, yeah, there’s my parents, but - we’re True Loves, apparently?”

“Yeah,” Henry says confidently. “You’re supposed to be together. We’re a family.”

Regina doesn’t say anything to that. She just strokes Henry’s hair again and looks thoughtfully at Emma. And yeah, it’s weird. This whole thing doesn’t feel like True Love. She and Regina haven’t talked about it at all, certainly haven’t _done_ anything - the night before, Regina slept in her bedroom with Henry while Emma slept in the guest room - and Emma hardly knows how to even start talking about it when she isn’t sure how she feels. Regina is beautiful and crazy hot, sure. And Emma’s sincerely glad that she’s alive. But love? She’d never thought that she felt anything like that for Regina, and she doesn’t feel it now. But then there’s the resurrection. Magic can’t be wrong, Emma guesses. Her son had been saved in much the same way, after all.

 

**Five days ago**

Emma arrives at Regina’s from work (which she’s been going to, because it’s an easy way to avoid the awkward conversations-they’re-not-having with Regina) and rushes upstairs to use the bathroom. Only she trips over all the damn suitcases lined up in the hallway and nearly breaks her neck. So she’s irritated when she comes downstairs again to talk to Regina in the living room.

“I know what you’re doing. You hate my car, so you’re making sure that we’ll have to take your car instead by packing so much. Though even with your car, I’m not sure there’s room for any of my stuff.”

“Sit down, Ms. Swan.”

Emma complies, but keeps complaining. “You have to start learning to show consideration for someone besides yourself or Henry. We’re going out of town together to start a new life-”

“You’re not coming.” 

“Okay, I know it’s not what either of us expected or wanted, but we’re 'True Loves'-” Emma emphasizes that phrase with heavy sarcasm and finger quotes.

“We are not each other’s True Loves.”

Emma stops mid-rant, mouth open for a second. “Oh. _Oh._ Thank god.” Regina gives her a sardonic smirk.

“Wait. How do you know that?” Emma’s initial relief has been overtaken by confusion. “I brought you back to life. That means love, doesn’t it?”

“You did not bring me back.”

“No, I kissed you, and there was this white glow-”

“Which caused my wounds to close up, yes. But I stayed quite dead. Think back, Ms. Swan. I returned to life when _Henry_ kissed me.”

Emma recalls the sequence. It’s true that Henry was the one who kissed Regina last, and it’s also true that romantic love isn’t required.

As if reading her thoughts, Regina says, “Yes, much as a mother’s love for Henry once led to him coming back to life, my son’s love restored me to life.”

“But the first time I kissed you, something _did_ happen.”

“Yes, and it took me a little time and research to understand. You see, Ms. Swan, you are the product of True Love, and you have magic as a result. It can be said that you’re the embodiment of True Love, even. And that allows you to approximate, to a degree, the effect of True Love. But only to a degree, which is why you couldn’t actually resurrect me.”

“Basically, I’m True Love, but I’m not your True Love?” At Regina’s nod, Emma lets out a sigh of relief. It all makes sense now, and it lets her off the hook. Except - 

“You can’t just take Henry. I won’t let you-”

“Henry will be staying here with you,” Regina replies calmly.

Emma stares at her. Finding her voice, she asks, “Does he know about this?”

“We discussed it earlier, yes.”

Emma yells from her spot on the couch, “HENRY!”

Regina sighs. “Manners, Ms. Swan. You do not _scream_ for someone from across the house. Try not to undermine my son’s upbringing completely.”

Emma rolls her eyes and gets up. But she only stops at the base of the stairs, and yells again for her son. She can see Regina mentally start counting to ten.

Henry comes down the stairs slowly, and Emma looks him in the eye.

“I guess Mom told you.”

“Yeah. We’re not True Loves, so I’m staying here. And you’re staying with me.”

Henry nods. Emma puts her hands on his shoulders. “Henry, is that what you want?”

Henry looks away for a moment, and then back up at her. “I want Mom to be safe,” he says. And Emma’s superpower isn’t really - it was always a convenient exaggeration on her part - but she can see he’s sincere. So she decides to let it go at that. It’s sort of like a divorce where the parents end up in far distant places and so the kids have to live with one fulltime. She’s glad it’s her.

Regina has joined them, and Emma asks her, “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow night. I want one last day with Henry.”

 

**Four nights ago**

Regina waits until nearly midnight before taking her leave. Emma watches from a relatively discreet distance as Regina and Henry say their final goodbyes in the garage where the Benz is parked. Regina gives Henry one of the burner phones Emma had purchased earlier in the day, and that sight lets Emma remind herself that this isn’t a total separation. Henry will be able to call Regina anytime he wants.

After Regina gives Henry a last hug and he backs away, Emma comes to say her own goodbye. Only she doesn’t know quite what to say, so she settles on, “Don’t worry. I’ll look after him.”

“I know you will.” The two women regard each other for a moment. Then Regina says with a rueful smile, “We’ve had a complicated relationship. You broke my curse, and I should hate you for that. But you also gave me my son. The one thing I can say for certain is that from the day you came to Storybrooke, you made life interesting.”

“Right back at you. Never a dull moment,” Emma agrees. She meets Regina’s eyes directly for the last time, and finds herself being drawn in. Regina looks like she’s about to say something, but Henry coughs and the moment passes.

Regina gets into her car and drives out of the garage. Henry turns sullenly and goes back into the house, but Emma follows Regina’s car to the street and watches her taillights until they recede out of sight. And for some reason, she has a feeling that she might have just made a very big mistake.

But what? And then Emma realizes, Henry. It’s all a ruse, Regina would never leave without Henry. She runs back into the house and calls for Henry, half-certain that Regina’s already teleported him away. There’s no answer, and he’s not in any of the downstairs rooms. Emma runs up the stairs yelling his name, and checks each room along the hall until she reaches Regina’s master bedroom. She skids to a halt, because there he is, lying on the bed staring at a framed picture of himself and Regina.

“Henry, why didn’t you answer me? You scared me.”

“Why? I’m here,” Henry replies irritatedly.

Emma leans against the doorjamb and watches, but Henry remains just as he is. There’s no purple smoke, no sudden disappearance. Okay, Emma thinks. She didn’t make a mistake after all.

A few miles away, Regina puts her car into park and quickly makes her way to a certain front door. Seconds later, she’s back in her car and on the way out of Storybrooke. She’d taken a risk, but it was something she had to do.

At sunrise, Archie Hopper steps outside to take Pongo on his regular early morning walk. But Pongo sniffs at the doormat and then whines at Archie. Archie bends down and finds an unmarked envelope concealed under the mat.

He opens the envelope and a ring falls out into his palm. He looks at it for a moment, and a flash of memory comes into his mind, of a woman’s hand twisting the ring as she talks. But the ring isn’t that distinctive, and he can’t be sure. Frowning, he looks in the envelope and finds a plain notecard. When he withdraws it, he reads in neat printed letters:

_Thank you_

_Emilia dos Santos_

 

He’s blinded for a minute by water in his eyes, and he has to take off his glasses. He clutches the ring in his hand, and bends down to hug Pongo and nuzzle his ear. The first two words in his mind, he doesn’t dare speak, even at this quiet hour with nobody in sight. 

_She’s alive._

The other three words, though, are safe enough, and there is no way he can keep them inside. His heart is too full of joy and will burst otherwise. “She did it,” he whispers to Pongo. “She did it!” Pongo lets out a happy yelp.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long delay! I'll try to get the remaining chapters up more quickly.

**Present**

Emma closes her eyes against all the memories. She still has a feeling that somewhere during that time, she’d made a terrible mistake. But replaying the events constantly hasn't gotten her any closer to figuring out her error. She falls back once again to her initial feeling, the night Regina left Storybrooke forever, that it has to do with the separation of Regina and Henry.

That spurs her to go check on her son. She looks at the clock and sees it’s been about fifteen minutes since he took his phone and went to his bedroom. So she walks down the hall and stands outside his door at an angle that lets her see him without him seeing her. He’s still on the phone with Regina, and she knows that whatever Regina is saying must be helping. His face is relaxed and content again. It’s been the same routine for all three nights after Regina left. Emma turns away and starts to head back to Regina’s bedroom. But then she remembers the deal she’d offered Henry, and goes to the guest bedroom instead.

Henry puts up little resistance the next morning when Emma tells him that Archie’s agreed to see him that afternoon after school. Archie meets Henry at school and takes him back to his office, so Emma doesn’t see Henry all day until she picks him up. Henry runs out to her car and greets her cheerfully, and Emma notes that he seems lighter. She keeps her side of the bargain and lets him sleep in Regina’s room alone, but she stays outside to keep watch. Around 10 she hears him on the phone, and that’s a little disappointing, but Archie had warned her the nightmares wouldn’t stop immediately. And that does make all the sense in the world to Emma. Regina coming back to life doesn’t just erase all the trauma Henry suffered in seeing his mother shot to death in front of him.

Emma and Archie agree that Henry will see him every afternoon after school for a while, and Henry’s strangely really positive about that. Emma thinks maybe it’s because he can talk to someone who doesn’t hate his adoptive mom. Not that Emma does, or even her parents really, but they have way more complicated histories with Regina than Archie does. And it’s definitely not easy for Henry to be at school and have to listen to trash talk about his mother’s death. The other kids had always watched what they said in the past, for fear that the Evil Queen might come after them, but with Regina gone…well, the Charmings don’t scare anyone. So Archie’s a welcome sight after a long day at school.

Emma’s worried about Henry less now that he’s seeing Archie - not that everything with Henry is just fine, but it feels like he’s on track. With less of her thoughts taken up by Henry, a new realization hits her.

She’s bored.

Her last words to Regina, “Never a dull moment,” keep ringing in her ears. She’d known at the time that was true, but not really _how_ true it was. But all the same, there it is: Storybrooke is really tedious without Regina. Emma sits in the police station every day with nothing to do, and thinks wistfully of how Mayor Mills would regularly turn up, in a seemingly endless succession of sexy power suits, with a few well-crafted insults that livened things up.

After an especially lackluster day at work - not even a cat to roust out of a tree - Emma finds herself drawn to Regina’s home office. It’s all because she needs a pen. (Of course, it’s a ridiculous excuse, because Regina was the kind of person who made sure that there was a pen and paper in an easily accessible location in every single room in the house apart from the bathrooms.) But Henry’s at Archie’s office, and Archie has taken to dropping him off at home after their sessions, so Emma is free to look for pens wherever she wants.

Emma sits at Regina’s desk and starts going through her files. They’re all from her time as mayor of the town, and because the official paperwork is stored at City Hall, the files consist generally of her notes from meetings and her correspondence with underlings and constituents. Although Emma doesn’t care at all about the issues being discussed -it’s all bureaucratic drudgery so far as she’s concerned - Regina’s writing is entertaining. Of course, it’s easy for Emma to find Regina’s cutting comments funny when they’re not directed at her. But, weirdly, Emma realizes she must have been something of a favorite, because the snark Regina aimed her way doesn’t come close to what she inflicted on others.

She comes across a letter Regina wrote to George, rejecting a zoning change, which calls to mind a phrase she’d heard on TV - a masterpiece of sustained sarcasm. Emma chortles her way through the letter, simultaneously happy and missing Regina all the more.

“What are you doing?”

Emma’s head jerks up and she sees Henry standing at the doorway. She’s flustered, as if she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t. So she lies. “Just cleaning out some files. I was thinking about using this office for my paperwork.”

Henry’s eyes narrow, and he steps into the room. “But it’s Mom’s office.”

The tone of his voice sets Emma on edge, and she replies in kind. “Not anymore.”

Henry flushes. “It’s my house. I inherited it. And I say this office is off-limits.”

“You didn’t actually inherit anything. She would have to be dead for that.”

Henry’s tone turns triumphant. “So it’s her house then. Either way, this is her office, and I don’t want you in it.”

Irked, Emma reminds him, “She doesn’t live here anymore. She left you.”

“That’s your fault!” Henry screams.

This hits a nerve in Emma. “We’re living here because that’s what you want. But that makes it my house too. Don’t tell me where I can’t go in my home.”

“This isn’t your home! You don’t belong in this office! Or her bedroom!”

Emma starts to yell back at him, but takes a deep breath and thinks better of it. “Henry, remember all the mean things you said to Regina?”

“I told her that I was sorry for that.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you actually had a chance to apologize, isn’t it? _After_ she came back to life, right?”

Henry’s face crumples then, and he runs out of the room. Emma slumps back in Regina’s chair, suddenly feeling like the weeks of apparent progress with Henry have vanished. His accusation that this situation is Emma’s fault especially upsets her. It’s something she’s turned over in her mind, but she just doesn’t see any way where it was actually an option to let Regina leave with Henry, even if Emma had been willing to have Henry taken away from her. He couldn’t just disappear; his grandparents, including Gold, would’ve never stopped looking until they found Henry. Which means they would find Regina. The only way to keep them from looking would be if Emma faked Henry’s death the way she did Regina’s, but she couldn’t do _that_ to her parents.

Emma is on the couch later that evening, watching something on TV without even knowing what she’s watching, when Henry creeps down the stairs and sits beside her. After a minute he says, “I’m sorry.”

Emma turns the TV off. “I’m sorry too. But you can’t talk that way to me. This is my house too.” She hesitates, so much more at the tip of her tongue. How she had never ever felt, growing up, like she had a home, and so it’s really hard for her to hear that the house she lives in with her son isn’t hers. But she reins herself in, because Henry is a ten-year-old boy going through a lot, and he is apologetic.

“I know. It’s just - I don’t want things to change.” Henry hesitates. “I know it’s not your style.”

“It’s not exactly yours either. But it’s Regina’s, and that’s why you like it, right?” Henry nods, and Emma puts an arm around him. “I’m not going to change anything. Well, except for replacing whatever we break. I’m a lot clumsier than she is.” Henry laughs at that and snuggles up to her. Emma clicks the TV back on and calls up a saved episode of _Ice Road Truckers._

A couple of weeks pass, and Henry starts sleeping through the night without nightmares. His sessions with Archie get reduced to once a week - more hanging out with a friend than therapy - and he moves back into his own bedroom. Emma’s glad, but she knows better than to even think of taking the master bedroom for herself, even though there’s been peace between her and Henry. The three spots in the house Henry most associates with Regina are her bedroom, her office, and the kitchen. The kitchen has to be used, obviously, because they need to eat. Henry’s told Emma it’s okay to use the office, and she’s taken him up on that - not mentioning that she’s actually able to do all her paperwork during her super-slow days at the station, and that she’s really going through Regina’s files whenever she’s in the office. But the master bedroom is different. The guest bedroom and bathroom are well-appointed, although Emma can’t imagine why when Regina never had any guests, and certainly way better than anything Emma’s ever had in her life. The master bedroom and bathroom are even more impressive, of course, but not worth the fight it would cause with Henry.

After a month, Emma brings up another potentially dicey topic with Henry. She wants to have full parental rights again, and the only way to do that is by adopting him herself. Surprisingly, Henry reacts with enthusiasm to the idea…until the issue of his last name comes up.

“I’ve always been Henry Mills.”

“I know. But living in this town, it would be better if you had my last name. After a while, people will start forgetting that the Evil Queen is your mother.”

“Living in this house is a reminder too,” Henry points out. “Are we going to move out?”

“No,” Emma promises firmly.

Henry still balks at the idea of changing his name, but doesn’t say no outright. But later, after a conversation with Regina, he comes downstairs and tells Emma he’ll do it.

“Mom said that if she were actually dead, it would be different. But she’s not even going by Mills herself anymore. She said it’s a cursed name and I’m better off changing it too.”

That tidbit gives Emma pause. She’s never asked Henry about Regina, but she can’t help herself now. “Has she settled down somewhere? With her new name?”

“Maybe. She drove around for a month, but she thinks she likes the place she is now.”

“But she hasn't told you where it is, or the name she’s going by?”

Henry shakes her head, and Emma is relieved but not surprised. Regina wouldn’t be so careless. It’s something they talked about before Regina left, the importance of Emma and Henry not knowing anything that could be used to track Regina down. The town thinks Regina is dead, sure, but with magic users around, the possibility always exists that the ruse might be discovered and that Regina’s enemies might decide to find a way to cross town limits. Gold already did it once, after all, and he still hates Regina for what she did to Belle.

So the day comes when Emma, Henry and her parents go down to the courthouse and Emma’s adoption of Henry is formalized. They all pose for pictures, beaming, and Mary Margaret hugs Emma afterwards.

“Finally everything is the way it should be. Our whole family, together.” Emma nods, but something in her stomach twitches uncomfortably. “And maybe you can move out of that house now, back to your own apartment.”

“That’s not happening. Henry doesn’t want to, and I’m not going to push him.”

Mary Margaret nods in understanding, but the truth is, Emma doesn’t want to either. Like Henry, the house is the one place she can really feel Regina, and more and more she finds herself falling under a spell as she roams the house.

It’s not just the stuff like laughing at Regina’s biting sense of humor in her mayoral files. The whole house has been put together with a thought and care that Emma’s only realized after she began living there. It started in the kitchen, of all places - Emma has been cooking more, and the first night she tried to do a remotely complicated dish, she pulled all the cookware she needed out and didn’t bother to place any of it back where it had been afterwards. It didn’t seem important until the next night, when it took her twice as long to find everything, and so that time she replaced everything exactly as Regina had it. That’s when she understood that Regina had a system in the kitchen in which everything was conveniently to hand.

Once she saw that, it started becoming apparent elsewhere. The towel rack is exactly where it should be so that she can reach it easily from both the shower and the sink. The bathroom cabinet isn’t over the toilet, so she doesn’t find herself dropping stuff into the toilet by accident anymore. The mirrors are made of glass that don’t steam over. There’s always a pen to hand. Cleaning supplies are stashed all over. Even the garage is well-insulated, so that Emma doesn’t freeze when going to her VW bug.

Henry follows Regina’s rules now, Emma suspects more so than he did when Regina was actually there. He always takes his shoes or boots off when he comes in. Emma tracked snow and mud in once and then had to spend fifteen minutes cleaning her mess up while Henry looked on smugly. And this leads her to a new and wild thought: Maybe the house is set up the way it is, and the rules are what they are, not because Regina was so industrious, but because she was lazy. Something Emma can relate to.

It makes sense. Regina had been raised like a princess, and became a queen. She probably hadn’t ever lifted a hand to do household chores until she came to Storybrooke and no longer had servants or magic. And then she became a single mom who was still a fulltime mayor. All Regina’s efficiency, Emma realizes, actually makes life easier. The decor may not be to her taste, but she appreciates a lot about the house. It’s much less complicated raising Henry here than it was in her apartment.

She sneaks into the master bedroom a couple of times when Henry is not home. Regina took all of her clothes with her, so there’s not that much to see. However, she did leave her books, and Emma glances over those. Regina as a reader is clearly a total snob - there’s not a book on her shelves that isn’t an award-winner of some kind. Emma notices an empty slot, probably where a spellbook had been. One of the last things Regina had done the night she left was gather up everything magic-related and burn it all in the fireplace, from books to ingredients.

It’s amazing that it takes so long, considering how much she’s missed Regina over the months and how much time she’s spent just wandering around the house looking to feel Regina’s presence, but somehow it doesn’t click until the afternoon she passes by Henry’s bedroom and hears Regina’s voice. He’s put her on speaker while he roots around under his bed for something, and while Emma can’t make out what Regina is saying, the voice is unmistakable.

That low, sexy voice. Emma hasn’t heard it in nearly seven long months. And her heart stops. She stands paralyzed in the hallway, until Henry finds whatever it was he was looking for and picks up the phone again, switching the speaker off and cutting Emma off from Regina’s voice. It’s then that tears spring to Emma’s eyes. And she knows, finally, what exactly her mistake was.

But there isn’t anything she can do about it. There never was, really, and the knowledge of that sends Emma into desolation. Her job is still so boring that she takes to wandering the town, ostensibly “on a beat,” trying to find something to lift her spirits. One day she walks through the park and hears, “You poor unfortunate soul,” as she passes by a girl on a bench. She looks closer and realizes the girl didn’t say it to her - she’s watching the movie on her iPad. But all the same, it seems supremely fitting.

She heads to the same docks that were so fateful that day long ago and looks out at the water. _You poor unfortunate soul_ rings in her head. Then she feels movement at her side and realizes that Archie has joined her.

“You look like you need a friend.”

“I don’t think anyone can help.” Archie waits, and Emma finally, reluctantly, says, “What do you do when someone is your true love, but you’re not theirs?”

“Are we talking about Regina?”

“What does it matter? She’s gone.”

Archie pulls something out of his pocket and holds it out to Emma. She looks at it and frowns. “Is that-”

“I look at it when I need to be reminded of the greatest success I’ll ever have. The Evil Queen.”

Emma looks closely at the ring. She’s sure she recognizes it, and she remembers Regina wearing it the day she left.

Archie continues, “It’s so tricky to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reason. The right reason is hardest, because most of the time that’s emotional, and you can’t help how you feel. But how you feel drives what you do, because people can’t act against their feelings forever. The next hardest, of course, is doing the right thing, because it can be hard even to tell what the right thing is. ‘And the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ And both those are so hard that sometimes people talk only about doing the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong thing for the right reason. The right way is the easiest of the three, you know. But it’s still important. And it’s still hard, because it’s generally about ingrained habit.”

Emma stares at him, but Archie only smiles. “Regina’s last act in Storybrooke was the right thing, in the wrong way, for the right reason. So not perfect. But if she can get the hardest two, she can get the third eventually. There were times I never thought she’d get even this far.”

Archie pockets the ring and walks away, leaving Emma with a spinning head. First, of course, is the realization that Archie knows that Regina is alive. Which explains why Henry was so happy to talk to him. But the right thing, for the right reason…and the wrong way being ingrained habit? What is Regina’s ingrained habit?

Regina is a lying liar who lies, that’s her ingrained habit.

Emma starts to run.

When Henry comes home after school, he finds that Emma has pulled out every remaining suitcase in the house. Emma tells him, “I’m packing all of our clothes. Figure out what else you can’t live without, and pack that. We’re leaving as soon as the school year ends next week.”

Henry breaks into a grin. “You finally figured it all out!”

Emma stops and looks at him. “Did you always know?”

“Yeah. I mean, Mom made me promise not to tell you. She said it wasn’t fair.”

“To take me away from my family?”

Henry nods. Emma goes over to him and crouches down. “She’s our family. And we’re going to go find her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't resist including a certain line in honor of Lana Parrilla's double turn. And if you don't recognize it - STOP reading fan fic and go watch the movie before tonight's episode. Heh heh.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the long wait, but I think I finally found what I needed - somebody to yell at me and give me deadlines!

Henry’s brow creases in puzzlement. “Go _find_ her? I can just ask her where she is. I’ll call her right now.”

He makes to run up the stairs, but Emma grabs him by his shoulders. “Kid, wait. We don’t want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, we went over all this seven months ago. We’ve been so careful with the burner phones and what you guys have said to each other. So what is she going to think if you suddenly call and ask where she is?”

“She might think I’m being forced to call,” Henry realizes. “By somebody who found out she’s alive.”

“Yeah. You know what she’ll do then - come running back here as fast as she can, fireball in hand, ready to roast whoever’s got you. And everybody finds out she’s alive.”

“Okay.” Another thought occurs to Henry. “But we talk every night. What am I supposed to say when she asks about my day? If I can’t tell her we’re driving around looking for her?”

Emma gives him a look. “You kept a pretty big secret from me all this time.”

“I didn’t actually lie,” Henry points out. 

“You can figure something out, I’m sure. And anyway, it won’t be for long. I’m good at finding people, remember?”

Henry nods, and Emma thinks about the other reason she has for not just calling Regina. It’s true that she’s a little high-strung when it comes to Henry, but still, Emma could probably convince her that it’s not some kind of trap.

It’s just that…it’s been seven months since she let Regina just drive away, not lifting a finger to stop her. Yeah, Regina had lied. But Emma also remembers how she’d avoided Regina in that last week, spending most of her time at work, keeping Henry around when she was at home. She hadn’t wanted to deal with the implications of the resurrection, and she’d grabbed the out when Regina offered it. The irony of her lecturing Regina about showing consideration for others at the very moment Regina was about to make an incredibly selfless gesture isn't lost on Emma, either. Regina had given Emma a life in Storybrooke with their son and her parents. So Emma feels like she should make an effort. Not just call Regina out of the blue and say…what? It’s not a conversation that should be had over the phone.

The final days in Storybrooke go quickly. It doesn’t take Emma that long to pack up her own things, but there’s also something she wants to bring Regina, and that takes her the better part of an afternoon. First she googles the instructions, and is discouraged by what she reads. But she tries anyway, and it ends up working out, and it gives Emma hope that everything will. 

Emma and Henry also spend as much time with David and Mary Margaret as they can. It had been hard for Emma to tell her parents that she and Henry would be moving away. They accepted the news with resignation, which in a way was almost worse for Emma than if they had tried to convince her to stay. But it made sense to them that Henry needed to start over somewhere else.

And so on a sunny Saturday morning, the day after Henry’s last day at school, the Charmings gather in the driveway after Emma finishes packing up the car. “I know you really tried,” Mary Margaret sighs to Emma. “You stayed for the school year. But he just doesn’t feel the same about Storybrooke after what happened, does he.” It’s not a question.

“Neither do I,” Emma says honestly.

David has water in his eyes, and he and Mary Margaret gather Emma into a group hug. “We’re just going to miss you so much.”

Emma promises, “We’ll call lots. And we’ll visit.” And she wonders inside just how much harder this would have been if she’d done it seven months ago when she’d been in a totally different headspace. She doesn’t like that Regina lied. But she does think she understands why.

“Well, hello. I’m sorry to intrude.”

They turn around to see Archie coming down the sidewalk with Pongo. He stops in front of them and tells Emma, “I just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Thank you for everything,” Emma tells him. Henry comes forward and gives Archie a hug. Then he gives Pongo a rub on the head.

Archie glances at Mary Margaret and David, and then looks down at Henry. “Pongo learned a new trick just this week. Tell him, ‘Shake.’”

Henry does, and Pongo immediately lifts a paw for Henry to shake. Henry grins. Archie bends down and gives Pongo a treat, telling him, “I’m so proud of you, boy.” He looks up at Emma. “It’s always important to tell someone when you’re proud of them.”

Emma gets it - it’s his message for Regina. “I’ll do that, Archie.”

Archie and Pongo leave, and Emma and Henry finally settle into the front seats of her car. Her parents stand in the driveway and wave. Emma looks at Henry. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Emma backs out onto the street, and drives in the same direction she’d watched Regina’s car go all those months ago.

Not long after they leave the Storybrooke boundary behind, she turns onto I-295. She's already done some calculations. Regina had left at nearly midnight after being up all day, so it makes sense that she would only have driven for the rest of the night and then stopped over somewhere come morning. So after looking at what places are seven or eight hours away, New York City seems the most likely candidate.

But when it comes time, shortly after they pass Portland, for her to change over to I-95, she starts getting an uneasy feeling. There’s another option, ME-114. But would Regina really get off a major freeway that late at night?

She might, if she hadn’t wanted to drive fast. And, Emma remembers, Regina knows nothing of the country outside Storybrooke, and she’s not easily scared.

In the end, it’s Emma’s gut that makes the decision on that one. Henry looks at her. “I thought we were going to NYC.” 

“I think she turned west here.” 

“Why?”

“Just a feeling. Isn’t that the family superpower? Finding each other?”

Henry cringes. “Don’t say that to Mom. You know she’s not a fan.” 

“Let’s just say it’s because of the connection we have then, okay? And it’s telling me she took this road.” She lets that keep guiding her, further and further west. Maine gives way to New Hampshire, and then Vermont. And finally upstate New York.

A motel appears in the distance, and signs indicate that a state park is further on. The sun is setting, so she pulls into the driveway of the motel, and she and Henry get out, happy to stretch their legs. He runs around a little, while she goes in to get a room for them. The motel owner, an older man named Jack, comes out from a back room, and they settle the details quickly. And then Emma takes a deep breath, because this is the moment of truth. If she’s right about the direction Regina took, she would have been here, because it’s a fairly remote area and short on options for places to stay.

She shows Jack a picture of Regina that she’d put on her phone - it’s from a shot she’d taken of the framed photograph from the house in Storybrooke, the one of Regina standing with her arms clasped around Henry, cropped to just Regina’s face.

Jack’s face lifts in immediate recognition. “Her. Yeah, she stayed here last year. Three nights.”

“You remember that much?”

“Hard to forget someone like her. She was very beautiful. And very sad.”

That hits Emma hard. Of course, it was something that logically she already knew, but to hear that someone else could see it…

“Did she pay with cash or credit?”

“Cash. I don’t usually accept cash, but she was very convincing.”

Yeah, Emma was sure Regina was. It got her out of having to show ID, too, no doubt. She doesn’t bother asking to see his book. If Regina had even signed it at all, she would’ve used a random name. But at least Emma knows now she does have some kind of instinct that’s attuned to Regina.

That’s critical because until Emma gets hold of the name Regina’s using for real, she doesn’t really have another good way of finding Regina. She’d been kept mostly in the dark on Regina’s preparations - all part of the “less you know, the better” mindset - but she does know that Regina had magicked a different VIN and license plates onto her car. And changed the name of the owner in the government databases to…the name Emma doesn’t know and needs to find out.

Regina’d taken care of some financial matters the same way, using magic to cover that she’d funneled money from her existing bank account to a new, Swiss naturally, account after her supposed death. Emma’s eyes had nearly popped out when Regina had shown her the amount of money that Henry was going to inherit (which is conveniently funding their Operation Find Regina roadtrip), but when she’d objected that Regina needed to keep some funds for herself, Regina had laughed and told her that it was only half of what had been in the account.

That had made Emma look at Regina in a different way, because it meant that Regina wasn’t just affluent, or even rich, she was super-rich. Emma had always thought Henry was a little spoiled with the stuff he had, but she’d come to realize that was influenced by having grown up with nothing herself. Regina had actually been quite restrained, all things considered. Certainly nothing like the woman she’d seen in that documentary about building the biggest mansion in the world, who’d filled up her car with all kinds of unnecessary junk for her kids.

“The curse, Ms. Swan,” Regina had told her with a smirk. “I knew I was going to a land without magic, and money can do a lot of what magic can. And it’ll be the same out there.”

Emma’s sure Regina isn’t going to use the identity she’d magicked up until she’s out of the northeast. So the next morning, she listens to her gut again, and her gut tells her to point her car south. Not to NYC, but to Pennsylvania and then Virginia. She’s able to keep confirming that she’s on the right track, because people in the motels and restaurants along the way remember Regina.

This gives her something new to be nervous about, because it doesn’t take long for Emma to realize that unlike in Storybrooke, where nobody was going to go near the Evil Queen, out here Regina has options. A lot of them. Emma can see the wistful desire in their eyes and in the endless variations on “sexy,” “beautiful,” “hot” and “gorgeous.” (But always “sad.”) She’d already known that she’d made a mistake in letting Regina leave alone, but now it’s seeming an even bigger mistake than before.

Luckily none of these people strike Emma as someone Regina would let near her with a ten-foot pole, and she holds onto that. A small voice deep down points out that she doesn’t really see herself like that either, but she’s able to ignore it pretty easily. At least until the day, in North Carolina, when she stops at an expensive resort and the beautiful, polished, sleek woman acting as the concierge hands back her phone after looking at the picture of Regina on it. Unlike all the others, there’s no glint of recognition in her eyes, but there’s just something about the way she so smoothly plays the situation off that tells Emma that she is lying.

That frustrates Emma because there is _no_ way that Regina could have gotten away with paying cash here - it’s far too expensive and exclusive a resort for that. So she slams her sheriff’s badge, which she’d kept just in case of something like this, down on the desk. Liane remains unfazed, but her manager notices and comes over. And Emma notes that while she may do nothing for Liane, the man definitely finds her attractive.

Liane argues that they should be protecting their customers’ privacy, but her manager overrules her. “We certainly don’t want to impede the police,” he says with a bit of a flirtatious wink at Emma. “Yes, she was here last year. Emilia dos Santos. She stayed for, what, a week?” Liane nods slightly in confirmation.

“That long?” Well, Emma supposes there was only so long Regina could put up with crappy motels. The name she was using was a perfect example - she couldn’t just be Emilia Santos, she had to be Emilia dos Santos. That “dos” really put it over the top. “What’d she do here?”

“We have a number of activities available. The spa, hiking trails, golf, dining…and our service is wonderful,” the manager tells her. “She seemed sad, and of course we wanted her to be happy, like all our guests. So Liane looked after her personally.”

“Did she now?”

“Yes. Whatever she required,” Liane drawls with an insinuating smirk, and Emma’s hands close into fists. She’s not sure if Liane is lying in order to annoy her, or is telling the truth in order to annoy her, but either way it’s working.

There’s very little she can do, though, other than smash Liane's smug, superior face in, and while that would make her feel good, it wouldn't be productive. She was the one who’d let Regina drive away. Regina was a free agent, and if she’d decided to…well. The important thing, Emma reminds herself, is that Regina’d left the resort in the end, just like she’d left Storybrooke. So if anything had gone on between her and Liane, it couldn’t have mattered much.

(She still hates the idea, though.)

She gets the credit card information from the manager and heads back to her car, already on the phone with an old buddy of hers from her bounty hunter days. She waits in the car with Henry, and ten minutes later her phone buzzes with an email.

She scans down the list of credit card activity and sees that Regina had driven to the coast, and then all the way down it to Miami. And then headed back up the other side of Florida, never staying anywhere more than one night the entire journey, until…her finger stops at the Tallahassee entries. Regina had stayed three nights in Tallahassee, and that gives Emma fresh hope after the Liane debacle.

She grins at Henry, and then returns to scanning the list. And then she frowns, because it simply stops dead months ago, the final entry someplace in Texas Emma’s never heard of.

She calls her friend again and asks him to look for any other cards under that identity with more recent activity. After some complaining, he eventually gets back to her and reports that there’s nothing.

Emma fills Henry in on the latest and sets her course directly for Texas - at least she’s been saved a lot of driving up and down coasts. The drive to Texas is long enough as it is.

Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma…the states pass by one after another. And although the drive is wearying, she’s really enjoying the time it gives her with Henry. Now that she’s figured things out and they’re on Operation Find Regina, the last of the resentment he’d held for her is gone. (Even during the months they’d been getting along well, she’d always sensed that there was a part of him who hadn’t forgiven her.) They play road trip games, and sing along with the radio, but mostly they talk. She tells him a lot about her past, and she can see he appreciates the implicit trust in this and that it’s helping him to understand her better. In return, he tells her all the stories of his childhood that she hasn’t heard yet. Regina features heavily in many, and it’s a second reason she likes listening to them.

Emma and Henry spend the night in Oklahoma, near the border, and it’s around noon that they reach Her Last Known Location (Henry has taken to saying that in a way that makes the caps evident). It’s a motel, of course, way out in the middle of nowhere, and Emma is uneasy as she views the place from the road. Even if she weren’t prejudiced by Her Last Known Location, this place would’ve given her the creeps. Regina must have miscalculated her drive, or maybe she’d had car trouble or something, because there was no way she would have stayed here otherwise. It’s basically a hangout for meth addicts and dealers, and no woman should ever be there alone, much less one who looks like Regina.

Emma tries to keep the concern off her face so that Henry won’t see, and reminds herself that this was months ago, and Regina has been talking to Henry every night. But that only means that whatever happened hadn’t been fatal. If Regina had been hurt - her hands clench the steering wheel at the thought - there was no way she would’ve told Henry, knowing as she did that the most important thing in the world to him is that she be safe.

She reluctantly pulls into the dirt lot that passes for parking, putting her car as close to the office door as possible. She hates the idea of bringing Henry in, but leaving him in the car would be even worse. So they go in together, pretending not to notice the losers that are hanging out drinking beer along the row of motel rooms.

The guy who runs the place, too young to have such a beaten-down look in his eyes, recognizes Regina’s picture, of course.

“She came in here at night, really tired. She was hoping to hear there was someplace further down the road, but there’s nothing for another hundred miles or so. So she took a room. Went in, and a whole bunch of the guys were outside hooting at her.”

“And you didn’t do anything?” Emma asks, really disliking him.

He snorts. “She came back out with a gun. Blew a beer right out of one guy’s hand. Then she turned right around and went back in. Kept her lights on. And she was no fool - she was gone before daylight, before they worked up their nerve to do anything to her car. It’s funny, you’re the first person looking for her _here_. The guys, they got her name and took off.”

Leave it to Regina to get a whole new set of haters after her, Emma thinks with a sigh as she gets back into the car. But it answers why Regina had paid with a credit card here of all places - it made them all believe that the name on the credit card was legit, and so they wasted time looking for an Emilia dos Santos.

Emma’s seemingly back to square one because Regina’s burned that name, but it’s not actually as bad as that. She doesn’t even need her gut to tell her that what Regina did was get to the 40 as fast as possible and head west to New Mexico. Probably didn’t stop until she was another state over. And at that point, might as well go all the way west to California. Regina seems to like coasts.

Two days later, Emma and Henry are driving north up the Pacific Coast Highway. There are just too many places for her to stop and ask about Regina at, but it’s a safe bet that she would have kept along that way as long as the scenery stayed beautiful, and it turns out that it does. They pass through San Francisco, northern California, Oregon…

They're in the middle of Washington now, and Emma really hopes that Regina didn’t cross over into Canada, because while she had no doubt magicked up a passport for herself, Emma doesn’t have one. Timeline-wise, they have to be nearing the end of Regina’s wanderings, but that irrationally makes Emma worried that her homing instinct has gone dormant after the long stretch of not using it - she hasn’t since North Carolina.

She tries showing Regina’s picture inside the convenience store at a gas station, and the man, who looks to be nearing retirement age, doesn’t recognize it. Emma goes back to the car where Henry is waiting, feeling like her worst fears have been confirmed - she can’t trust her gut anymore, and she’s going to have to give up and have Henry call Regina after all.

She stops and looks back at the store, and suddenly she’s sure she’s not wrong. She goes back in to confront the guy.

“I know you’ve seen her.”

“I think you should just turn around and leave.” He’s edgy, and she can see him moving his hand under the counter - going for a panic button? Or a gun?

Neither is what she wants, and she’s clearly come on a little too strong, so she starts to pull out her sheriff’s badge. But he’s already looking past her. “Henry?”

She turns around and sees that her son followed her in. He asks, “You know me?”

The man grins and brings his hand back above the counter. “Your mom showed me pictures. Told me all about you.”

Emma relaxes. “That’s why I’m looking for her. I’m bringing him to her.”

“You should’ve said that right off. Well, no harm done. I’m Andy.” They shake hands.

“Do you know where she is?”

“No. We talked for a while, though, and Emilia said she was getting tired of driving. Asked if there were any places I could recommend. She was interested in small towns.”

Emma notes that apparently Regina kept going by Emilia. She wants to ask about the last name, because it would make things easier, but she figures Andy expects her to know it. And he might not know it anyway. “And did you?”

“I gave her three.” He pulls a piece of paper out and writes the names down. Emma scans the list, and none of them mean anything to her.

“What did you tell her about them?”

Andy taps the first name. “This one’s a town on the coast, west of here. The next is a little south, and it’s mostly forest, all the houses very secluded. And that one is way out east, in the middle of the country. Lots of farms and ranches.”

“What made that one stand out?”

He smiles. “I loved the sky. Amazing sky.”

Emma thanks him sincerely and heads back out with Henry to discuss. She looks back at Andy as she leaves, and wonders at Regina choosing him of all the people along the way to really talk to. Maybe he’d reminded her of her father, as he’d been…or as she wished he’d been?

“The first one sounds a lot like Storybrooke,” Henry says. “And the second one might remind her of the Enchanted Forest.”

“Yeah.” Emma looks west, then south. And then slowly, she turns east. “Kid, I think she picked the third.”

“Farms and ranches?” Henry says disbelievingly.

“I know, I know. But it’s what my gut says.” Henry sighs at that. “What? You haven’t doubted me in a while.”

“It’s just that these two towns are close, and that one is really far away. If we go out there and you’re wrong, we’ll have to come all the way back. Shouldn't we just check out these first?”

Emma looks at him more closely, and she can see that he’s tired. The long roadtrip is wearing him down, much like it seems to have finally worn Regina down (and that makes Emma doubt herself, because maybe Regina thought just the same way as Henry, thought she should go to one of the closer towns rather than do the long drive to the heartland).

It’s not just that, though. Henry’s running out of days; he’s told Emma this. It was the solution he came up with for what to say to Regina each night when she asked about his day. Weirdly, the separation had brought them closer than they’d ever been, maybe because they realized how easy it would be to drift away, to start missing phone calls, and so they made sure that didn’t happen. Over the long months in Storybrooke, Henry had always told Regina everything that’d gone on that day, and he hadn’t wanted to start lying now. He’d hit on a compromise: Each night he tells Regina about one of the days from _before_. Before they’d made up, before he stopped shutting her out. Instead of telling her about the actual current day, he tells her about a day from before that he hadn’t told her about then because he didn’t want to tell her anything then. It is his way of making all that up to his mother now. But because school’s not in session, he can only use weekend days, and he’s nearly out of those.

Emma bites her lip. She’s pretty sure that the third town is the right one. But it’ll only take a day to check out the other two towns, and Henry will be happier. It’s just one more day. It doesn’t really make that much difference.

Or does it? What if Regina’s engaged, and that extra day is the difference between getting there before or after the wedding?

Ridiculous. Regina’s right, she should stop watching so much TV. Regina would have mentioned something like that to Henry.

Or would she? She might not want Henry to feel like she’s moved on, replaced him…

Emma screams at her brain to stop. She knows the neuroticism is just because she’s so very, very close now. One more day, they’ll drive around Washington some more and reassure Henry and then take off.

And that’s what they do. Emma makes a good-faith effort and asks in first the pretty coastal town (they take a break to dip their toes into the Pacific, which is cold even at this time of year this far north) and then the quiet forested town which seems more appropriate for hermits than families. Henry is satisfied, and they head east that afternoon. The states and days tick by: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota…Emma really hopes that Regina didn’t get a second wind and decide to drive through all the lower 48.

After spending the night in South Dakota, they get in the car for hopefully the very last stretch. It’s early evening when they finally arrive at the third town, but since it’s summer, it’s still light out. They stop at the town boundary and just stare at the welcome sign for a few seconds.

“This is it,” Henry says, perking up noticeably. They grin at each other, and then Emma floors the accelerator. Suddenly she feels like she can’t handle this going on for even another minute - it’s been almost eight months now, and it’s been torture listening to Henry talk to Regina every night. Not _listening_ listening - it’s his private time with his other mother, and she respects that - just hearing his voice as he talks, and sometimes laughs, making her wish she knew what Regina had just said. And every now and again he puts Regina on speaker and Emma gets to hear her voice. But she, herself, has had absolutely no contact with Regina.

Yeah, Emma definitely can’t wait another minute. She parks the car on the main street, close to the diner - hooray for small town commonalities - and goes in. There’s even a kindly old woman behind the counter, and Emma asks after Regina for the very last time. (Except this time, she just asks by name, and doesn’t show a picture.)

“Emilia? She took over the Porters’ old place. So nice to have someone in there again.”

This woman isn’t quite as sharp as Granny. To be fair, she’s probably twice as old as the ancient rotary phone sitting on the counter. “And where is that? I’m not from around here,” Emma says, stating the obvious.

“Turn right at the corner, go two blocks to Juniper, and turn right. After a while, you’ll come to Pine. Turn left there and then right at Holly. Her house is on the next corner. It’s blue.” She beams at Emma.

Emma thanks her and all but runs back outside to the car. The woman watches her go, and the friendly, slightly dotty smile drops off her face. She ignores the rotary phone on the counter and takes her cell out of her pocket.

When her call is picked up, she speaks grimly into the phone. “A stranger was just here, looking for Emilia. You had better take care of it. We don’t want any trouble.”


End file.
